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Does theism lead to immoral behaviour?

DNB

Christian
None of these gentlemen is around to define anything, and, as their self-appointed spokesperson, you don't get to define anything. Lexicographers do, and they base their definitions on how speakers of the language actually use words. If just anyone can make up definitions, then anyone else is free to ignore them.
I'm sorry, you are way off, not even in the running.
Philosophy transcends the conventional use of language, that any grammarian or technician would not have a clue how to interpret, for example: turn the other cheek, born-again, eat my flesh and drink my blood, if your eye offends you cut it out, living by the spirit and not the flesh, I and the Father are one, man and wife are to become one, treating evil with kindness is like placing burning coals on the aggressor's head, not one comes to the Father but by me, ...

Only Jesus Christ defines Christianity, obviously.

Maybe you're not getting the point - if someone kills in the name of Jesus, and Jesus never told anyone to kill in his name, then the killer cannot be accused of defaming Jesus, obviously.

Only Jesus defines Christianity.
 

Subduction Zone

Veteran Member
I'm sorry, you are way off, not even in the running.
Philosophy transcends the conventional use of language, that any grammarian or technician would not have a clue how to interpret, for example: turn the other cheek, born-again, eat my flesh and drink my blood, if your eye offends you cut it out, living by the spirit and not the flesh, I and the Father are one, man and wife are to become one, treating evil with kindness is like placing burning coals on the aggressor's head, not one comes to the Father but by me, ...

Only Jesus Christ defines Christianity, obviously.

Maybe you're not getting the point - if someone kills in the name of Jesus, and Jesus never told anyone to kill in his name, then the killer cannot be accused of defaming Jesus, obviously.

Only Jesus defines Christianity.
No, people that believe in Jesus Christ define Christianity. Jesus is not here today to define the term.
 

Copernicus

Industrial Strength Linguist
I'm sorry, you are way off, not even in the running.
Philosophy transcends the conventional use of language, that any grammarian or technician would not have a clue how to interpret, for example: turn the other cheek, born-again, eat my flesh and drink my blood, if your eye offends you cut it out, living by the spirit and not the flesh, I and the Father are one, man and wife are to become one, treating evil with kindness is like placing burning coals on the aggressor's head, not one comes to the Father but by me, ...

Actually, you are talking to a linguist who has a much better clue of how to interpret all of those expressions than you do. I've also got a background in linguistic philosophy, which you don't. I'd recommend that you dismount from your high horse, but I doubt that you have a clue about how to do that either. ;)


Only Jesus Christ defines Christianity, obviously.

Maybe you're not getting the point - if someone kills in the name of Jesus, and Jesus never told anyone to kill in his name, then the killer cannot be accused of defaming Jesus, obviously.

The only thing here that is obvious to me is that you don't know what you are talking about when you try to lecture me on how to define words and expressions. I'm not worried about Jesus's reputation because some kook kills someone and claims to be doing it for Jesus. Lots of people claiming to be Christians have actually done that, and they get to define Christianity as much as you do.

Only Jesus defines Christianity.

If he were here, he might ask that you refrain from pretending to speak for him. English speakers establish patterns of conventional word usage, and lexicographers study those patterns in order to come up with definitions. That's how it works in the real world, and No True Christian lexicographer would dare to disagree with me. :innocent:
 

Kelly of the Phoenix

Well-Known Member
When a solider enlists and goes to boot camp, the first thing they do is break down their ego; bias of relative morality. You will forced to become lower than a worm, until the ego gives up. Once you hit rock bottom, the training starts; born again. This training has its eye on the ball. It sets the foundation for a team spirit that can work together even under dire stress. Religions tend to start basic training earlier; childhood, while atheist morality starts later. If the ego over develops; spoiled child, it can resist being born again, instead it will justify itself with a narrow philosophy.
And of course there are never evil military types, nor clergy.
 

Kelly of the Phoenix

Well-Known Member
And you think that if you don't make them angry, they won't hurt you, but you're not completely sure because they have an extremely violent temper and are known to lash out in anger. So, if you disobey them and make them angry with you, then there will be hell to pay
Yeah, Job is a testament to how you could be doing everything right and He will STILL smite you for the hell of it.
 

Sgt. Pepper

All you need is love.
Not really. God’s too dumb for that. He decided to spare a small sample of the tainted product and then wondered why the same problems showed up.

Assuming that God even exists, my opinion is that he is either (1) not omnipotent and omniscient and is completely inept, resulting in him making terrible mistakes and an inability to learn from them, or (2) he knew precisely what he was doing and did it anyway despite knowing the outcome. However, when I consider specific scriptures in the Bible, I tend to lean more toward the second explanation. In that regard, I see God as a sadistic and psychotic monster.

That's not mentioning the biblical story about God committing global genocide by drowning humanity (aside from Noah and his family) in a worldwide flood because he is royally pi**ed off about how wicked mankind behaves. So he decides to kill off mankind and start over.

Yeah, Job is a testament to how you could be doing everything right and He will STILL smite you for the hell of it.

God's vanity seemed to have gotten the best of him, so he exploited poor Job as a cosmic pawn and purposefully inflicted pain and suffering on him during a pi**ing match with his archnemesis, Lucifer, so that he could stroke his ego and establish himself as the Big Kahuna of heaven. In other words, God is extremely arrogant and self-centered and wouldn't allow Lucifer to show him up. I've always heard that Lucifer was proud, and that led to his own downfall. If he was proud, he followed God's example. Of course, it's a story, and I think that we should take whatever the Bible says with a grain of salt. I think the Bible is riddled with contradictions and the stories of Jesus are copied and adapted from Greek mythology and other pagan religions (see here).
 
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The Hammer

[REDACTED]
Premium Member
Inspired by this thread:


Sauce for the goose and all that.

My personal take: yes, theism often - though not always - leads to immoral behaviour.

Prison statistics, medical statistics and personal experience shout that I can agree with that.

Probably better to ask of Immoral behavior leads to Theism. Based on the number of prison conversions I hear about.
 

ChristineM

"Be strong", I whispered to my coffee.
Premium Member
Probably better to ask of Immoral behavior leads to Theism. Based on the number of prison conversions I hear about.

Im not sure i go for "prison conversions" so much. I think it's more a way of lowering the percentage of Christians in nick.
 

It Aint Necessarily So

Veteran Member
Premium Member
And the dimension 10 is apparently outside diameter, including the edge of the "sea". And 30 is apparently the inside circumference. By these two dimension we an calculate that the thickness of the edge was about 0,71. So, no, Bible doesn't have an error in this.
I think you did your thickness calculation incorrectly. You need for the two numbers to give a ratio of about 3.14. Calling one an inner dimension and the other an outer one was a good start. We need to know what inner diameter corresponds to a ratio of 3.14 when compared to 30, so we divide 30 / 3.14 = 9.554, so we need to shorten the 10 by 0.445 units, therefore, that was obviously the thickness of the perimeter.
No one has demonstrated [what the Bible says about a global flood] to be wrong. I don't think you can provide any reasonable argument against the Bible story
Disagree, but we can still stipulate to the point, since it doesn't need to be disproved to be disregarded.

Do I understand correctly, if someone claims Bible is demonstrably wrong, he should prove his claim is correct?
Yes, but only if he wants to be believed, and we are assuming that the student is sufficiently prepared to understand the argument and is willing to be convinced by a compelling one. There's no burden of proof where is no possibility of proving.
I have not decided. I think it is possible [Thor] existed.
Do you think that's credible? Do you think anybody believes you believe that that is possible? This you giving homage to a system of thought that you don't actually respect. That's what a critical thinker says. He doesn't believe Thor exists, but he knows what it takes to say that it is impossible, and knowing the limits of knowledge available to man, doesn't make that claim.

But that's not how a creationist thinks. Yet, he wants to be respected for having a rational and empirical basis for his beliefs anyway. That's what creationist apologetics is for - to give the creationist the sense that these things support his beliefs, too, and so he begins talking about the limits of what microevolution can accomplish, how entropy prevents evolution, what cannot be observed or reproduced in a laboratory, and other sciency-sounding subjects, like 747s assembling in junkyards under the direction of tornadoes and the fine tuning of the universe.
Evidence for the great flood would be:
1. Oil, gas and coal fields
2. Massive sedimentary formations
3. Modern continents
4. Marine fossils on high mountains
5. Ice age and great glaciers
6. Stories about it all over the world
I think [4] explains why the flood myth appears in the Bible, which depicts the creator in an unflattering way. It blames its creation for not being what it wants them to be, murders most of them and most other terrestrial life in a cruel manner, and then uses the same breeding stock to repopulate the earth. Why put that story in the book? Because from their ancient perspective, it seemed like it must be true. How else did those shells and other marine fossils get up there except for an act of an angry god?

if vast amount of organic material sunk, it would obviously have caused very large gas, oil and coal formations.
Why would that have happened? Those deposits represent millennia of deposition, not forty days worth of biomass.
Unless one is a hypocrite or charlatan, or has a wicked view of God, then without theism the world would be just as the animal kingdom - dog-eat-dog, looking out for number one, the survival of the physically fittest, kill or be killed, with absolutely no remorse when an injustice is committed.
"Atheist are routinely asked how people will know not to rape and murder without religion telling them not to do it, especially a religion that backs up the orders with threats of hell. Believers, listen to me carefully when I say this: When you use this argument, you terrify atheists. We hear you saying that the only thing standing between you and Ted Bundy is a flimsy belief in a supernatural being made up by pre-literate people trying to figure out where the rain came from. This is not very reassuring if you're trying to argue from a position of moral superiority." - Amanda Marcotte
theism always leads to morality
Perhaps you should look at the American news. It's theism on steroids, and people will die because of it.
Both you and Steven Weinberg are referring to the misguided, exploitive and/or insincere.
Yes, they are. That's what the church is churning out and depositing into the neighborhoods. Look at their white evangelicals. They vote for the likes of sexual predators like Moore and Trump in droves.
there is no such concept or significance to morality if God does not exist.
The Abrahamic god fails to meet the humanist standard for moral behavior.
since when does anyone define a religious system based on the position of the interpreters?
For as long as people have been evaluating such systems. I posted this a few months back:

"This is one of the huge benefits of participating here for me. We can generate a spectrum for each worldview and compare them all. Secular humanism is generating the highest frequency of intelligent, educated, decent people. Theistic humanists (they don't call themselves that, but they are essentially indistinguishable from the atheistic variety apart from a god belief that doesn't cause them to abandon reason and innate decency), dharmics (like you, who might also be considered a theistic humanist), and many pagans/LHP do very well also, with few reprehensible opinions expressed. And it goes downhill from there. My conclusion? The less religion one has, the better off he is. Look at the other end of the spectrum, where faith and submission to doctrine dominate thought. This is where America's white evangelicals fall - Trump's people."

We do that by looking at the adherents, not their books. We do that by evaluating their actions, not their words. They say, "our Bible teaches to love one another." No it doesn't. It just says that in a few places. What it teaches is what its adherents are learning, not what a few passages in the book giving lip service to an idea that doesn't resemble how such people actually treat one another.
God is the author of morality - a concept incomprehensible to the secular realm.
Incomprehensible? You flatter yourself. Nothing you believe is incomprehensible to critical thinkers except why you think that they would believe it, too.
Only Jesus defines what Christianity is
Not for me. I do that.
You are surprised that God destroyed the world - what reasonable and insightful person would ever think that humans don't deserve that?
This is one of the most objectionable tenets of the Abrahamic religions, which depends on people believing that a just god would destroy them. If you read my treatment of the flood myth, I referred to that idea that anything bad happening in the world is God punishing man because he needs another cosmic beating. Why did God drown the earth? Sinful humans. The had it coming. Same reason he threw them out of paradise and gave them mutually unintelligible languages. It's why Sodom and Gomorrah needed destroying. And it's why you and I need Jesus. Because we were born deserving being swatted with a rolled up magazine just for being human, and it's amazing grace that provides the loophole, PBUH. The whole notion is off-putting to a humanist, and why he doesn't think much of this moral framework.
I believe that you have an inflated view of yourself, and your species.
More of this abominable worldview, which depends on depicting man as helpless and totally dependent on a god for a deity to be saved from himself, which saved a once-lost wretch like me. Man has a hereditary disease, and only Jesus holds the cure. Enough with that. Man is the only hope of improving the human condition, which he has done quite well since putting gods away.
you're not appreciating how corrupt that we all are.
Another gift of this beautiful worldview. You're not appreciating that we are not all corrupt. I'm not, nor are most of the people I know.
do you think that there's a single atheist on this forum who would possibly understand what I said?
Do you think that there is one who couldn't? Why do you keep implying that your thoughts are difficult to understand? Because they are roundly rejected? That's how I know that they ARE being understood.
start to appreciate your own wretchedness
More of this beautiful worldview. That's where the wretchedness is found. Could it be any more anti-human? Imagine extraterrestrials talking about man the way Christians do: "You're all corrupt and wretched." Those are enemies of man.
anyone who claims that they're in good moral standing, hasn't got a single clue.
Only you have a clue, right? Only you are qualified to decide these matters, right?

You worship a bigoted god, so you have nothing to teach the humanist about morality. My moral status is unrelated to archaic, irrational, religious moral codes.
when we are faced with two seemingly contradictory precepts, the art of exegesis requires harmonizing the two and not having one supersede the other, like you appeared to do.
There's the difference between our two traditions - empiricism and religious apologetics. The first answer in this post was to a motivated reasoner, which is somebody doing what you describe - attempting to reconcile scripture with scholarship - or harmonizing, as you call it - by showing how 30/10= 3.14 using creative accounting. My response was me doing the other - attempting to replace a bad idea with a better one, or supersede it as you say.
It's extremely spurious to listen to God haters scream for justice, when most of them are gratuitously aggressive and definitively mean-spirited.
More of this beautiful worldview, which depicts skeptics as mean-spirited, gratuitously aggressive God haters - a perfect description of your own posting behavior if we change God-haters to freethinkers. It's you running around the thread with your hair on fire gratuitously emotional and with malice for skeptics. You don't like them, do you? Bad atheists. Sinful atheists. Get that rolled-up newspaper out again. It's time to smite for righteousness' sake.
 

Subduction Zone

Veteran Member
Im not sure i go for "prison conversions" so much. I think it's more a way of lowering the percentage of Christians in nick.
The number of declared atheists is, as you probably know, very low in the US. That may be partially due to the bias that still exists for Christianity in the US. If one "sees the light" in prison one is more apt to get paroled than if one denies believing in God but still promises that one is reformed. For some odd reason parole boards are more likely to believe people that claim to be Christians. If anything I would be willing to bet that the recidivism rates are far higher for those that declare themselves to be Christians than for those that claim not to believe in God. I wonder if that statistic has even been studied.
 

DNB

Christian
Actually, you are talking to a linguist who has a much better clue of how to interpret all of those expressions than you do. I've also got a background in linguistic philosophy, which you don't. I'd recommend that you dismount from your high horse, but I doubt that you have a clue about how to do that either. ;)




The only thing here that is obvious to me is that you don't know what you are talking about when you try to lecture me on how to define words and expressions. I'm not worried about Jesus's reputation because some kook kills someone and claims to be doing it for Jesus. Lots of people claiming to be Christians have actually done that, and they get to define Christianity as much as you do.



If he were here, he might ask that you refrain from pretending to speak for him. English speakers establish patterns of conventional word usage, and lexicographers study those patterns in order to come up with definitions. That's how it works in the real world, and No True Christian lexicographer would dare to disagree with me. :innocent:
You need to stop your pedantic and presumptuous nonsense - clearly your hubris has rendered your understanding utterly oblivious to the topic at hand.
Jesus Christ defines Christianity. Technicians, as yourself, are not qualified to understand wisdom, and apparently culpability.
 

DNB

Christian
I think you did your thickness calculation incorrectly. You need for the two numbers to give a ratio of about 3.14. Calling one an inner dimension and the other an outer one was a good start. We need to know what inner diameter corresponds to a ratio of 3.14 when compared to 30, so we divide 30 / 3.14 = 9.554, so we need to shorten the 10 by 0.445 units, therefore, that was obviously the thickness of the perimeter.

Disagree, but we can still stipulate to the point, since it doesn't need to be disproved to be disregarded.


Yes, but only if he wants to be believed, and we are assuming that the student is sufficiently prepared to understand the argument and is willing to be convinced by a compelling one. There's no burden of proof where is no possibility of proving.

Do you think that's credible? Do you think anybody believes you believe that that is possible? This you giving homage to a system of thought that you don't actually respect. That's what a critical thinker says. He doesn't believe Thor exists, but he knows what it takes to say that it is impossible, and knowing the limits of knowledge available to man, doesn't make that claim.

But that's not how a creationist thinks. Yet, he wants to be respected for having a rational and empirical basis for his beliefs anyway. That's what creationist apologetics is for - to give the creationist the sense that these things support his beliefs, too, and so he begins talking about the limits of what microevolution can accomplish, how entropy prevents evolution, what cannot be observed or reproduced in a laboratory, and other sciency-sounding subjects, like 747s assembling in junkyards under the direction of tornadoes and the fine tuning of the universe.

I think [4] explains why the flood myth appears in the Bible, which depicts the creator in an unflattering way. It blames its creation for not being what it wants them to be, murders most of them and most other terrestrial life in a cruel manner, and then uses the same breeding stock to repopulate the earth. Why put that story in the book? Because from their ancient perspective, it seemed like it must be true. How else did those shells and other marine fossils get up there except for an act of an angry god?


Why would that have happened? Those deposits represent millennia of deposition, not forty days worth of biomass.

"Atheist are routinely asked how people will know not to rape and murder without religion telling them not to do it, especially a religion that backs up the orders with threats of hell. Believers, listen to me carefully when I say this: When you use this argument, you terrify atheists. We hear you saying that the only thing standing between you and Ted Bundy is a flimsy belief in a supernatural being made up by pre-literate people trying to figure out where the rain came from. This is not very reassuring if you're trying to argue from a position of moral superiority." - Amanda Marcotte

Perhaps you should look at the American news. It's theism on steroids, and people will die because of it.

Yes, they are. That's what the church is churning out and depositing into the neighborhoods. Look at their white evangelicals. They vote for the likes of sexual predators like Moore and Trump in droves.

The Abrahamic god fails to meet the humanist standard for moral behavior.

For as long as people have been evaluating such systems. I posted this a few months back:

"This is one of the huge benefits of participating here for me. We can generate a spectrum for each worldview and compare them all. Secular humanism is generating the highest frequency of intelligent, educated, decent people. Theistic humanists (they don't call themselves that, but they are essentially indistinguishable from the atheistic variety apart from a god belief that doesn't cause them to abandon reason and innate decency), dharmics (like you, who might also be considered a theistic humanist), and many pagans/LHP do very well also, with few reprehensible opinions expressed. And it goes downhill from there. My conclusion? The less religion one has, the better off he is. Look at the other end of the spectrum, where faith and submission to doctrine dominate thought. This is where America's white evangelicals fall - Trump's people."

We do that by looking at the adherents, not their books. We do that by evaluating their actions, not their words. They say, "our Bible teaches to love one another." No it doesn't. It just says that in a few places. What it teaches is what its adherents are learning, not what a few passages in the book giving lip service to an idea that doesn't resemble how such people actually treat one another.

Incomprehensible? You flatter yourself. Nothing you believe is incomprehensible to critical thinkers except why you think that they would believe it, too.

Not for me. I do that.

This is one of the most objectionable tenets of the Abrahamic religions, which depends on people believing that a just god would destroy them. If you read my treatment of the flood myth, I referred to that idea that anything bad happening in the world is God punishing man because he needs another cosmic beating. Why did God drown the earth? Sinful humans. The had it coming. Same reason he threw them out of paradise and gave them mutually unintelligible languages. It's why Sodom and Gomorrah needed destroying. And it's why you and I need Jesus. Because we were born deserving being swatted with a rolled up magazine just for being human, and it's amazing grace that provides the loophole, PBUH. The whole notion is off-putting to a humanist, and why he doesn't think much of this moral framework.

More of this abominable worldview, which depends on depicting man as helpless and totally dependent on a god for a deity to be saved from himself, which saved a once-lost wretch like me. Man has a hereditary disease, and only Jesus holds the cure. Enough with that. Man is the only hope of improving the human condition, which he has done quite well since putting gods away.

Another gift of this beautiful worldview. You're not appreciating that we are not all corrupt. I'm not, nor are most of the people I know.

Do you think that there is one who couldn't? Why do you keep implying that your thoughts are difficult to understand? Because they are roundly rejected? That's how I know that they ARE being understood.

More of this beautiful worldview. That's where the wretchedness is found. Could it be any more anti-human? Imagine extraterrestrials talking about man the way Christians do: "You're all corrupt and wretched." Those are enemies of man.

Only you have a clue, right? Only you are qualified to decide these matters, right?

You worship a bigoted god, so you have nothing to teach the humanist about morality. My moral status is unrelated to archaic, irrational, religious moral codes.

There's the difference between our two traditions - empiricism and religious apologetics. The first answer in this post was to a motivated reasoner, which is somebody doing what you describe - attempting to reconcile scripture with scholarship - or harmonizing, as you call it - by showing how 30/10= 3.14 using creative accounting. My response was me doing the other - attempting to replace a bad idea with a better one, or supersede it as you say.

More of this beautiful worldview, which depicts skeptics as mean-spirited, gratuitously aggressive God haters - a perfect description of your own posting behavior if we change God-haters to freethinkers. It's you running around the thread with your hair on fire gratuitously emotional and with malice for skeptics. You don't like them, do you? Bad atheists. Sinful atheists. Get that rolled-up newspaper out again. It's time to smite for righteousness' sake.
You don't actually expect me to respond to the entirety of your post, do you?
You must even be surprised that I read it all ...I was curious to see how much effort you did in compiling all the quotes from so many different threads. But, too many contexts to try and address each one cogently.

Either way, if God does not exist, then theist need to be not taken serious in any aspect of their lives. But, if God does exist, then shame on all the atheists for being so oblivious and evil minded.
 

F1fan

Veteran Member
You don't actually expect me to respond to the entirety of your post, do you?
A person with a sound rebuttal with facts could. So I guess the atheist is the truthful poster.
You must even be surprised that I read it all ...I was curious to see how much effort you did in compiling all the quotes from so many different threads. But, too many contexts to try and address each one cogently.
Funny how believers accuse non-believers of not being about to understand them, and here it's you.
Either way, if God does not exist, then theist need to be not taken serious in any aspect of their lives.
That is the gamble theists make. And what facts can they show that their belief is true or justified? None.
But, if God does exist, then shame on all the atheists for being so oblivious and evil minded.
How can critical thinkers be oblivious when there is a lack of evidence? If a God exists and wants to be known, it would show itself. But all we have are stories in books believed by a long tradition of people.
 
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